“Wotsit All About”: James Ostrer’s Candied Bodies Take On Our Diet-Obsessed Culture

The haunting tension between
beauty and decay, nature and artifice, captured by James Ostrer’s
cinematic photographs can readily be traced to his first career, as a set
painter for the English National Ballet. During the seven years that he toiled
offstage there, devising atmospheric backdrops for the romance of the theater,
the 35-year-old British artist witnessed thousands of performances and
rehearsals that offered him an insider’s view into a ballerina’s world. It
wasn’t until a piece of scenery “fell out of the gods,” as he recalls, causing
serious injury to his back, that he decided to leave the ballet and pick up a
camera—and although he never set foot backstage again, the enduring
contradiction between the illusion of grace and the obsessive perfectionism
embodied by those dancers has continued to inform his work.

In the years since, Ostrer has gained
an international reputation for the raw, disconcerting brutality of his
photographs, which depict rigorously honed, disciplined bodies in uncomfortable
spatial relationships with accessories of their contemporary existence, and
earned him the National Gallery’s London-Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in 2010.
This
exhibition, on view at Gazelli Art House, is
anchored by a suite of works that Ostrer was commissioned to create in 2014, as
the National Portrait Gallery Curator’s Choice. Collectively titled “Wotsit All
About,” they feature human subjects plastered in coats of sugary
comestibles, from commercial cake batter and cupcakes to sour straws and gummy
eggs.

Pictured from the waist up, seated
and facing the camera against vibrant, solid-color backgrounds, the subjects of
each image concurrently pay homage to and parody the history of portraiture,
traditionally used to celebrate and immortalize an individual. Ostrer’s models,
ironically, exist as faceless poster children for a diet-obsessed society, even
while they are treated formally with the exaltation of a royal. Wax-lip mouths
agape, candy-shaped eyes bulging from crusty green and pink flesh, heads
distorted by donuts to resemble African masks crowned by tribal adornments, the
figures are unrecognizable as living people, so thoroughly have they been
transformed into gruesomely frosted figurines. The show’s title operates as a
clarion call for reflection: it suggests the fraught reality of a globalized
world in which the feverish dissemination of mass-produced, synthetic materials
increasingly dominates cultural exchange.